In the study reported on here I investigated how teachers used available information and communications technology (ICT) resources to transform teaching and learning in the Bojanala district in the Northwest province of South Africa. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework enabled understanding of how the use of available…

Aim/Purpose: The aim of the present study is to explore the online participation of nine English as foreign language (EFL) Arab learners in group writing discussions through a Facebook group over the study period of three months and how the EFL learners view the role of the Facebook-facilitated peer review activities in promoting their online…

In this study, the authors analyzed all research articles published between 2002 and 2011 in the "Journal of Computer Assisted Learning," in order to understand the research topics methods, major contributing authors, and most-cited publications. Over the 10-year period, they found the journal has explored educational uses of computer…

The purpose of this action research was to explore students' perspectives regarding using Web 2.0 technologies to develop a community of learners. The course described in this study was a fully online course in an Educational Learning Technologies master's program at a medium-sized university in the U.S. Southwest. A variety of Web 2.0 tools…

According to Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman (2011), we use a language with others as a form of shared cognition, and in the process we scaffold each other. This action research investigates how students' online written output affects each other's writing. One thousand twenty online entries written by 21 Japanese university sophomore English majors…

Social media provide a multitude of opportunities for knowledge contribution and sharing. However, the content reliability issue has caused comprehensive attention, especially on credible social media, such as Wikipedia. Despite Wikipedia's success with the open editing model, dissenting voices give rise to unreliable content due to two…

When major news breaks in our hyper-connected society, we increasingly turn to an encyclopedia for the latest information. Wikipedia's coverage of breaking news events attracts unique levels of attention; the articles with the most page views, edits, and contributors in any given month since 2003 are related to current events. Extant…

There is a growing need to design learning experiences in higher education that develop collaborative and mediated social writing practices. A wiki way of learning addresses these needs. This paper reports findings from a case study involving 58 postgraduate students who in small groups participated over eight weeks in a mediated collaborative…

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned a report called, "Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education", asking educators to, "...test new teaching methods, content deliveries, and innovative pedagogies using technology-based collaborative applications" (p. 6). Fittingly, technology-based collaborative…

While collaborative learning and collaborative writing can be of great value to student learning, the implementation of a technology-supported collaborative learning environment is a challenge. With their built-in features for supporting collaborative writing and social communication, wikis are a promising platform for collaborative learning;…

This study proposes the use of case-based reasoning to help educators design with Web 2.0. Principles for designing a web-enhanced case-based activity (CBA) were used to design an online professional development course for a group of 16 in-service educators. The Learning in Context model was used as a scaffold to help participants in their design…

The purpose of this study was to explore the codependencies of the social and technical structures that yield Wikipedia the website and Wikipedia the community. In doing so, the research investigated the implications of such a sociotechnical system for the maintenance of the project and the emergence of collective intelligence. Using a theoretical…

This paper reports on a design study conducted within the Egyptian context of pre-service EFL teacher education, which implemented a Community of Practice (CoP) design facilitated by Facebook, to integrate some new forms of online writing. Based on some preliminary empirical results triangulated with literature review, a preliminary design…

This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a modern, multi-disciplinary, distributed laboratory involved in sensor network research. By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation examines the collaborative ecology of CENS in terms of three networks of…

The University of South Australia and Purdue University (Indiana) launched the "Grammar Gang Blog" in June 2008, as a collaborative forum for talking about language. The blog reaches a far-flung community of learners from Australia to the United States, Brisbane to Bangalore and Ghana to Germany. The Grammar Gang--where Owls meet…